Saturday, March 01, 2014

Media-Whore D'Oeuvres

Gloria Vanderbilt and Andrew Slaby

"This past Wednesday at the 1stdibs Gallery in the New York Designer Center at 200 Lexington Avenue, they opened an exhibition of Gloria Vanderbilt's 'The Left Hand is the Dreamer,' work from 2013 - 2014 in gouache, collage, and pastel. The opening brought out a lot of friends of Gloria, as well as two of her sons." (NYSD)

"Walking into a dinner party for fifty chic and some not-so-chic people in a nearby village last week, I was confronted by a tall man with horn-rimmed glasses who called me his neighbor but then added, 'No, you’re not my neighbor—what’s your name?' No cunning linguist I, nor used to being barked at by nouveau-riche whippersnappers, I turned my back to him and told him to 'Look it up in the Almanach de Gotha, asshole!' He wasn’t best pleased, especially as I also called him dickhead. Now, please don’t think for a moment that I approve of my bad manners. But nor do I accept some hemorrhoid of a man half my age acting like a cop in a cheap gangster movie circa 1936. The name of the whippersnapper whom I don’t know nor want to know turned out to be Hunt, spelled with a 'C.' His very rich American wife bought him the Wally Yacht company, one started by an Italian friend of mine that is now rumored to be in receivership or close to it. She’s a nice woman whose father was Mort Sackler, an inventor of some drug that made everyone happy and also made him a happy billionaire. What she should do is invest in a book of manners or tutorials on social graces—they would be much cheaper—and teach John Hunt to be less arrogant and less likely to be hit by an old-timer like me ... So there you have it, dear readers—society at its best during the height of the Gstaad season 2014. There are exceptions, of course. A dinner party by Dino Goulandris for the ex-prime minister of Canada, Brian Mulroney (who attended with his wife Mila), was a wonderful evening. The premier gave a graceful speech ending with a Yeats poem and my host asking me to respond. My answer was that I might be plucky, but I am not stupid. To respond after such an articulate and charming speech was like going to bed with a woman who had just made love with Rubirosa; it makes a man feel small and rather clumsy. (Incidentally, Brian Mulroney spoke with great affection about Conrad Black and told us he was doing very well back in Canada.) The next evening, Prince Pierre d’Arenberg and his beautiful wife Sylvia threw a hell of a bash for a hell of a lot of us, one that left me feeling that my nights were finite, but a good ski the next morning pumped me up enough to attend a great dinner given by Chaz Price and Jonathan Sieff and their wives, one that closed out the week that tripled the size of my liver but registered a minus as far as my years to come are concerned." (Taki)

"Michael Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio, Donald Trump ... Adam Schefter? ESPN's NFL reporter tops a new list of the most influential New Yorkers on Twitter, ahead of mayors and famous people past and present, based not on followers — Schefter has 2.7 million to, say, Fallon's 11.7 million — but recent engagement. The data, compiled by social media company PeerIndex, uses a special set of algorithms to come up with a New York influence score it calls 'Apple π,' measuring interactions through responses and retweets. (The info came from 30 days in 2014, ending February 24, which just so happened to include the nearby Super Bowl, so Schefter's reign on top could be short. For more on the methodology, keep reading and check here.) The full results, though, are an amusing collection of celebrities, politicians, rappers, and reporters, all of whom somehow manage to just about sum this place up." (NYMag)

"Gender was as fluid as the cocktails being poured at the National Arts Club on Thursday night, where Flatt magazine celebrated it latest issue with Robert De Niro on the cover. (No, he didn’t show.) Among the bearded hipsters were some women, but they were hard to find. 'All of these models look like guys,' said one guest as he stared at androgynous Andrej Pejic, who graces the new book, and his two gender-bending friends. As Jimmy Fallon’s 'Tonight' show drummer Questlove and designer Timo Weiland deejayed, Flatt’s editor-at-large, actor Matthew Modine, was asked how he liked living in LA. 'It sucks,' Modine told Ralph Lauren model Morgan O’Connor, Nur Khan and Jean Shafiroff. 'It would be great to come back to New York.'" (p6)